Featured Articles: 2010

Meditation has been getting a very good rap lately. Very good. Scientists have proven that it actually makes you happier. It is included in mental health programs. It is being taught at gyms, schools and in the workplace. It has stopped being...

Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...

Kenneth Folk and I were recently discussing how surprised we were to see the difficulty Anderson Silva had in UFC 117. “I've gotten into the habit of thinking of Silva as invincible,” Kenneth told me. I expect Georges St. Pierre to...

(originally published in the Huffington Post)
Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek has an interestingly harsh critique of Western Buddhism and the meditation tools it employs. Framing his critique in Marxist terms, he argues that Buddhism is the...

On Wednesday, September 1st, Tibetan Buddhist master Ringu Tulku Rinpoche will be speaking at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York. The topic? The Buddhist View of Environmental Catastrophe.
I'm looking forward to this talk because I...

I've been working these past few weeks on writing a proposal for a television series about the human brain, and it's been interesting seeing how much of neruoscience relates directly to my study and practice of Buddhism. One thing in...

When the Buddha became enlightened, the first thing he handed out was the four noble truths and upon becoming a Buddhist, they are your benchmarks.
1. Life is suffering. (Doesn’t mean “life sucks,” by the way. More like,...

Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...

Excuse me, I just went to the Bahamas for a second. Steve Martin used to say something like that, back in the day, when a joke flopped or he lost his train of thought. I feel like getting it tattooed on my left arm, because apparently the “...

I was discussing with a friend last week who went to Naropa University's summer writing program how good of a performance poet (which I think is equally important to the written words) Anne Waldman is. Then this morning my awesome girlfriend...

Just finished listening to John Baker’s talk about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which was part of the class on “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.” Baker spent a lot of time talking about CTR’s drinking and his sexual...

Many people look to Siddhartha Gautama as an example of someone who attained nirvana, a buddha. Every week in this column we look at what it might be like if Siddhartha was on his spiritual journey today. How would he combine Buddhism and...

Instead of a quote from me today, I thought I'd share two awesome Huffington Post articles that are each creating a lot of conversation. One is from my father, Shambhala Buddhist teacher, Musician, and all around good guy, David Nichtern on...

I love lojong - about 56 or 59 slogans developed in the 12th c. by Tibetan Buddhist teachers to retrain the mind.
Many, many buddhist teachers since, from Jamgon Kongtrul to Pema Chodron to Alan Wallace have written commentary on these slogans...

This is the first entry in what I hope will be an ongoing fortnightly journal. While I am not formally a librarian of any sort, over the last few years I've compiled a fairly substantial cache of information (general interest and...

A common issue that comes up for me in meditation practice is trying to balance the relationship between "applying effort" and simply "letting be". I liken this mental balancing act to the culinary equivalent of working...

People seem to utterly tie themselves in knots over confusion about what karma actually is and how it functions. This is one reason I really like David Loy's quote of the day below. And here's the intro part of a lecture by Buddhist monk...

by Jerry Kolber
Over the past few months I've been making my way slowly through Mark Silver's fantastic Heart of Money course. Mark is a Sufi healer who offers an opportunity to look at money through a heart-centered lens - as a...

I enjoy the writing of Bill McKibben a lot, although his new book Eaarth was a bit too scary for me to read right now. He thinks deeply about food, ecology, wealth, and interdependence. He also thinks deeply about television and its effects on...

My company regularly has meetings in which we discuss what is and isn't working, and during which we generate new ideas. Sometimes, the topics that come up are as simple as the way our calendars sync, or how our database functions. ...